Youth Speaks alumna Anna Yang is the 2022-2023 Santa Clara County Youth Poet Laureate. Yang’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cæsura 2022: RESET, The New York Times, The Stanford Daily, KQED, The Journals of Justice, among others. Her writing has received multiple accolades, including awards from Scholastic Art & Writing, the National Council of Teachers of English, and Foyle Young Poets. Yang received honorable mention for the inaugural Amanda Gorman Future Voices Poetry Prize. She resides in California’s Bay Area.

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YOUTH PORTFOLIO

Recollection, postmortem

By ANNA YANG

Even at midnight, 爷爷 warns me about capitalists
as he drops bills into a can for fried stinky tofu. His
breath clatters down streets, protecting red lanterns
and portraits of Mao, murmuring disapprovals for the
city he stands in.